Lifeboat Foundation

When CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta and committed to the metaverse, he said that gaming would lead the way.

That’s an interesting comment, considering that Facebook has billions of social media users, while game companies like Roblox and Microsoft (Minecraft) have amassed hundreds of millions of gamers. In fact, the entire game industry’s reach is about as big as Facebook’s alone, at around three billion people.

Though, the numbers of users isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to building a metaverse that people actually want to go to. It’s challenging to predict who will win, as the incumbents in the space — game companies — may not have an advantage if another party enters the space and creates an ambitious next-generation metaverse. But it is important to note that, Zuckerberg isn’t alone in believing in gaming.

No matter how big that number sounds, it isn’t much compared to standalone blockchain-based games. Axie Infinity, an NFT-focused video game developed on the Ethereum network, surpassed $1 billion in total trade volume in August 2021, perhaps the most prominent 30-day period in the history of NFTs.

With so much interest in NFTs, it’s only natural that developers have begun to develop the infrastructure necessary to handle what will undoubtedly become a massive secondary market for these assets. In addition, holders want real tangible benefits to holding NFTs, and in a crowded gaming market, new entrants need to differentiate to survive.

2022 is likely the year NFT games become more mainstream, especially now that many crypto investors own these assets. And real innovation, not just in NFTs but in gameplay and mechanics themselves, will be the driving force.

Wed, Feb 2 at 11:30 AM PST.

Dr Jim Green, NASA Office of the Chief Scientist, looks at the science behind the blockbuster movie: The Martian.

The bestselling book about an astronaut stranded on Mars was brought to life in Ridley Scott’s film, The Martian. Before production started, Ridley called NASA to obtain information about NASA’s plans for human exploration of Mars as well as the science of Mars that would contribute to a realistic look and feel of the film in keeping with the approach laid out in Andy Weir’s book.

Continue reading “Tha Martian: Science Fiction and Science Fact” »

Back in 2016, we told you about the iBubble, an underwater drone that autonomously follows and films scuba divers. Well, it now has a more capable industrial-use big brother, known as the Seasam.

Manufactured by French marine tech company Notilo Plus, the Seasam actually first hit the market in 2019. That said, it recently gained attention when it was featured in the horror film The Deep House, in which a scuba diving couple explore an underwater haunted house … and yes, that is kind of a cool premise for a movie.

Continue reading “Seasam drone autonomously follows divers and performs underwater tasks” »

It was cute at first. When Xbox head Phil Spencer took the stage at E3 2018 and announced the acquisition of five notable studios – Undead Labs, Playground Games, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games and The Initiative – the air inside the Microsoft Theater turned electric. It felt like the company was righting a wrong in its business plan and finally building an internal roster of exciting games that it could offer exclusively on Xbox platforms. You know, a few friends to keep Master Chief company.

Today’s announcement that Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard, the largest third-party publisher in the video game industry, doesn’t feel as harmless. Four years on and numerous acquisitions later, the Activision Blizzard deal feels like an extreme escalation of Microsoft’s plans, and it could mark a turning point in the video game industry as a whole, with negative consequences for both players and developers.

So far, public reaction to the acquisition has been mixed, which makes sense for a few reasons: first, Activision Blizzard’s sheer size is daunting, and this purchase represents more money and industry power than Microsoft’s previous gaming acquisitions combined. Second, Activision Blizzard is currently the subject of multiple investigations into allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the studio, where CEO Bobby Kotick has been in charge and largely unchecked for the past 30 years. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Kotick is poised to leave the company in a golden parachute once the Microsoft deal goes through.

“Don’t look up” — where Earth is threatened by a “planet killer” asteroid.

This movie hits its target.

Continue reading “Netflix’s best apocalypse movie reveals the truth about planet-killing asteroids” »

In social deduction games, groups of players attempt to decipher each others’ hidden roles. They need to observe the other players’ actions to deduce their roles while still hiding their roles. Essentially, to succeed in the game, the player needs to learn about the other agent through various sources while remaining anonymous. This needs players to cooperatively work against the other team.

Hidden Agenda

DeepMind and Harvard’s Hidden Agenda is a social deduction game to train multiple players in two fundamental groups. These teams are ‘Crewmates’ and ‘Imposters’. Crewmates have a numerical advantage with the goal to refuel their ship using energy cells scattered around, and Imposters have an informational advantage with the goal of halting the Crewmates. This means the Crewmates are unaware of the roles of the other players, but the Imposers have this knowledge. An environment is created where each player is randomly assigned a role and colour for their avatar at the start of each episode and initialised to a location on the game map.

Oculus Quests a re some of the best wireless VR headsets you can buy. But they can’t run high-end games like those found in the Steam Store. You can connect to a PC with a cable, but that’s inconvenient. Wirelessly streaming VR games required jumping through hoops with using developer mode and SideQuest. But with the $20 Virtual Desktop app, that’s not the case anymore.

Virtual Desktop always had the capability to wirelessly stream SteamVR games, in truth. You could install the streaming app on your PC and then your Oculus Quest VR headset, and as far as the app was concerned, you would have been good to go. But Oculus prevented the app from streaming VR games and limited it to just controlling your PC in a VR environment. It did so in the name of customer experience.

Schell Games today announced that Lost Recipes, its upcoming historical cooking sim, is set to release January 27th on the Quest platform, bringing with it the chance to cook ancient recipes in period accurate kitchens from around the world.

Arriving from the VR veterans known for I Expect You to Die, Until You Fall, and the upcoming VR adaptation of Among Us, Lost Recipes throws you into a time portal to recreate dishes from centuries past.

Continue reading “Historical Cooking Sim ‘Lost Recipes’ Coming to Quest January 27th” »